Pietra Rivoli Sweatshops

Everyone who lives in America know that sweatshops are bad, but the question is, is a sweatshop really that bad? Author Pietra Rivoli explains her views on the issue in her novel The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy and breaks it down into why sweatshops are bad and why they are good. Along with Rivoli’s arguments, sweatshops can help stop the war on poverty, drugs, and terror. I believe that sweatshops overall are a good thing to have and that we shouldn’t get rid of them. Pietra Rivoli, the author of The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, breaks her book up into 4 main parts: King Cotton, Made in China, Trouble at the Border, and My T-Shirt Finally Encounters a Free Market. In part one, King Cotton, Rivoli looks at …show more content…
Her main point in the whole section is that with more goods come more globalization, and this causes igniting fears and negativity within the American people. Rivoli talks about American quotas on Chinese goods and resources and goods from other nations, for example cotton from Japan. Rivoli also talks about tariffs, which is a tax on imports or exports, and their negative effects on the American economy. These do support American companies, the government however could not even hope to demand the various goods that could be obtained cheaply from China’s labor market. The government was then forced to open the gates for international goods, and with opening the gates also came a flow out of the United States of goods to less-privileged …show more content…
First of all it gives people a job with a paycheck. The job isn’t the best job with all the terrible conditions that the workers have to go through such as no air conditioning and working long hours with hardly any pay, but in the end it is better then selling their bodies for prostitution or going out and working in the trash fields looking for plastic in order to recycle. Secondly, working in the sweatshops where they are making clothing is better than working in a field making drugs to sell. I think that history has a way in that it will repeat itself. Britain and the United States once had sweatshops and they dug their way out of it and were able to get better laws and regulations making the work place better. Granted that it is going to be harder for third world countries to get out of these terrible conditions and that it is going to take way longer and it is going to be way harder in our to get the better conditions, I think that they will be able to do it and in the future be able to better